Bloomberg News

Russian Ban on U.S. Adoptions Reflects Strained Relations

By Nicole Gaouette and Flavia Krause-Jackson
December 28, 2012

Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, said Thursday he intends to sign into law a bill banning U.S. adoptions of Russian children. Photographer: Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP/Getty Images

Russia’s move to prohibit Americans
from adopting Russian orphans is the latest threat to the Obama
administration’s flagging attempt to “reset” relations between
the two Cold War rivals.

President Vladimir Putin today signed a bill to ban U.S.
adoptions of Russian children that the country’s parliament
approved in retaliation for a new U.S. law sanctioning Russians
accused of human rights violations. The prohibition goes into
effect Jan. 1, according to a statement e-mailed by the Kremlin.

The U.S. today criticized the Russian action, with State
Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell saying that more than
60,000 Russian children have been adopted by Americans in the
past 20 years. The State Department reports that 962 Russian
children were adopted by Americans in 2011, about one in ten
U.S. international adoptions.

“The Russian government’s politically motivated decision
will reduce adoption possibilities for children who are now
under institutional care,” he said in an e-mailed statement. He
also expressed concern that the ban will halt adoptions already
underway, preventing “those children who have already met and
bonded with their future parents to finish the necessary legal
procedures so that they can join their families.”

The action and reaction reflect a relationship already
strained by friction over other issues, such as democracy
promotion, missile defense, weapons proliferation and the
conflict in Syria. While relations are much improved from the
Cold War era of mutual assured destruction, they’re getting
frosty again with nationalist sentiment rising in Russia as the
economy loses steam and the world’s biggest energy exporter
faces slipping oil prices.

Trading Barbs

“The reset accomplished most of its objectives, and now
the question is where do you go from here?” said Angela Stent,
director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European
Studies at Georgetown University in Washington. “That is more
questionable.”

Peppery rhetoric has been fueling the fire. Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton has called Russia’s defense of Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad “despicable”, and her spokesman
dismissed the country as “back in the USSR.” Russia’s
Pravda.ru website responded by using the acronym “FUKUS” to
describe its main United Nations opponents on Syria -- France,
the U.K. and the U.S.

Syria, Iran

Russia and the U.S., though, still need to work together to
resolve number of dangerous issues, including Syria, North
Korea, Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program, and reviving
negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. The Obama
administration also hopes to work with Russia on expanding trade
and U.S. investment, and would like to broker more arms control
treaties, including on tactical nuclear weapons.

There’s little chance that the crisis in Syria will end in
anything but chaos if the U.S. and Russia -- both of which worry
about the rise of Islamic extremism in the country -- can’t find
a way to cooperate on the issue, said Fiona Hill, a senior
fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington policy group.

“We can’t really avoid the Russians,” Hill said in a
telephone interview. “In the global sweep of things, we have a
lot of common concerns, but we approach each issue from very
different perspectives.”

Some analysts tie the growing friction to Putin, who won a
third term as president in March 2012 after four years as prime
minister. He had been president from 2000 to 2008.

U.S. ‘Signal’

Clinton criticized Dec. 2011 elections, which increased
then-Prime Minister Putin’s parliamentary majority, as “neither
free nor fair.” Putin counterattacked by accusing her of
instigating protests by giving opposition activists “a signal”
to start their “active work” -- an echo of the term “active
measures,” which described political warfare by the KGB, the
Soviet intelligence service in which Putin served.

“Putin is particularly sensitive about the West meddling
in Russia’s domestic affairs,” Lilit Gevorgyan, an analyst in
London at Englewood, Colorado-based IHS Global Insight, said in
an e-mail. “Should Obama decide to seek another, more durable
‘reset’ to add to his achievements, Putin could be
problematic.”

Indeed, in the months since Putin’s election, Russia has
moved against U.S.-backed democracy promotion efforts. In
October, officials ejected the U.S. Agency for International
Development, a branch of the State Department, from the country,
accusing it of trying to sway the Russian vote.

‘Foreign Agents’

Two U.S. democracy promotion groups backed by Congress left
Russia in November and December after the parliament broadened
the definition of treason and began requiring non-governmental
organizations that accept foreign money to register as “foreign
agents.”

That move isn’t just about silencing dissent within Russia,
said Thor Halvorssen, president of the New York-based Human
Rights Foundation. It also sends a message to the U.S., which
provides much of funding to Russian civil society groups.

To exercise real leverage over Russia, the U.S. will have
to work “in collaboration with European allies to hold Russia
to international trade and human rights standards,” William Pomeranz of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute for
Advanced Russian Studies in Washington wrote in a December
policy paper.

Gevorgyan said the problem isn’t so much the state of the
“reset” as the fact that the relationship “is in danger of
becoming irrelevant to both.”

Russian Reset

The March 2009 reset, begun by Clinton and Russian Foreign
Minister Sergei Lavrov, was meant to repair relations soured by
the 2008 war in Georgia, a former Soviet republic; the Bush
administration’s 2001 decision to pull out of the 1972 Anti-
Ballistic Missile Treaty; and disagreements over U.S. plans to
install missile defenses in Poland and Romania, both former
Soviet satellites.

Since 2009, Clinton and President Barack Obama worked with
Russian leaders to pass the New START Treaty, a long-range
nuclear arms reduction agreement. Russia has backed U.S.
sanctions on Iran in the UN Security Council and canceled its
exports of missiles to that country. Russia also facilitated the
movement of supplies to U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan when
Pakistan shut supply lines through its territory.

Those accomplishments have been paired, though, with
setbacks.

In June 2010, the FBI arrested 10 members of an alleged
Russian spy network. Putin became the first world leader to skip
a G8 meeting when Obama hosted it in May 2011. That year, Russia
began blocking U.S. attempts to sanction Syria’s Assad at the
UN.

‘Despicable’ Defense

By February 2012, Clinton was publicly calling Russia
“despicable” for its defense of the Syrian regime.

In October, Russia backed out of an agreement on nuclear,
biological and chemical weapons security. On Dec. 14, Obama
repealed a law that required Russia to certify its human rights
record annually in order to have normal trade privileges with
the U.S.

That trade action, sought by Russia, was coupled with the
one that triggered the Russian bill banning adoptions. On the
same day, Obama signed the Magnitsky Act, which would impose
visa restrictions and an asset freeze on Russian officials
allegedly linked to the death of anti-corruption lawyer Sergei
Magnitsky and other human-rights abuses.

“Putin is furious with the Magnitsky bill,” Halvorssen
said.

Follow Suit

Russian leaders fear that other countries will follow suit,
said Pavel Khodorkovsky, president of the New York-based
Institute of Modern Russia, a policy group he founded to
continue the democracy promotion work of his father Mikhail.
Once Russia’s richest man as head of the Yukos Oil Co., he was
jailed for fraud by Putin, and is now one of Russia’s most high-
profile political prisoners.

“It’s a very, very real possibility,” Khodorkovsky said
of the chance that Canada, the U.K. and other countries in
Europe may take action. Many members of the Russian elite keep
their assets outside the country to insulate themselves from
shifting political winds, Khodorkovsky said in a telephone
interview from Poland.

To contact the reporters on this story:
Nicole Gaouette in Washington at
ngaouette@bloomberg.net;
Flavia Krause-Jackson in United Nations at
fjackson@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
John Walcott at
jwalcott9@bloomberg.net